ISLAM: A REBELLION AGAINST THE BIBLE
In the first thirteen chapters of this book I have laid out the differences between Islam and the Bible. I first began to notice them when I came to the United States after growing up in Egypt under Islam. The Bible-based culture of America and the sharia-based culture of the Middle East are like night and day—or, rather, like day and night. The Bible led me out into the light after I had been living in darkness for the first thirty years of my life.
The longer I lived in a culture formed by the Bible, the more I compared everything here in America to everything I knew growing up in the Islamic world. And the more clearly I saw how Islam is a direct contradiction of the Bible on virtually every significant point. While the Bible frees Christians’ hearts and minds, Islam traps Muslims in slavery to pride, shame, and fear. While the Bible forbids lying, Islam commands it. While the Bible condemns lust and greed, Islam promises to reward them. While the Bible fosters loving, happy family life grounded in the mutual fidelity between one man and one woman, Islam demands faithfulness only from the woman—on pain of death—and fosters family strife, with up to four wives (plus sex slaves) competing for the man’s attention for themselves and their children, and encourages the man to look forward to acting out his basest lustful fantasies with other women in the next life. While the Bible teaches confession and forgiveness of sins and warns Christians to “Judge not,” Islam teaches Muslims to hide their own sins and ferret out and punish the sins of others. While the God of the Bible loves everyone He has created, the God of Islam hates non-Muslims. While the overriding theme of the Bible is the redemption and happiness of believers, the overriding theme of Islam’s holy book is punishing non-believers.
It is truly astonishing. The Bible and Islam are like mirror images of each other. But how did it happen that almost a quarter of the world’s population has embraced a religion that is a perfect contradiction of the Bible’s teaching on nearly every important point?
To understand, you have to go back to the life of Muhammad and his situation on the Arabian Peninsula fourteen hundred years ago.
A Counter-Revolutionary Faith
Abul A’la Maududi called Islam “a revolutionary faith.”1 It would be more accurate to describe the Muslim faith as counter-revolutionary—a backlash against the revolution that the Bible had created in human society.
The Bible, given to man by God, was the original revolutionary book. It told the human race to follow the path of Jesus, Who would lead us through a miraculous transformation of redemption and healing. And the transformation in Christians’ born-again hearts changed the course of human civilization. This supernatural and revolutionary transformation could never have developed through the natural wisdom of man alone.
Historian W. E. H. Lecky called Christianity “an Agency . . . which all men must now admit to have been . . . the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of men.”2
Christ did not come to make enemies. He did not have hidden goals and selfish priorities that required His followers to sacrifice their lives, to kill and get killed to enslave other human beings. Jesus did not come to command us to hate, destroy, and terrorize. The Earth already belongs to God, so what kind of God would command his followers to engage in holy expansionist wars to conquer the world? And what kind of religion would make the sword its symbol?
Following Jesus was never going to be easy. Christians’ power does not come from the sword. The Bible says, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
Those who chose to follow Jesus through the narrow gate were few. “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13–14).
But those who follow Jesus are the ones who will have the light of life: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12).
Muhammad refused to take the narrow road behind Jesus. And he didn’t just quietly reject the Bible. Instead, he launched a ferocious rebellion against it and everything it stood for. Islam is a negative religion, consumed with subversion. It is a rebellion and a counter-revolution against the Biblical revolution.
It is not just happenstance that Islamic values are the opposite of Biblical values. Muhammad rejected Christianity as an alien belief system that would have subordinated Arab culture—his culture—to outsiders’ principles and the outsiders’ way of life. Muhammad’s answer to the challenge that the Gospel posed to his culture was a new, specifically Arab religion. He borrowed a lot from the Bible—including monotheism. But he was not going to allow Arabia to be transformed by the good news of Jesus. Instead, he wanted the Arabs’ culture to be preserved in stone—and conquer the world.
Muhammad custom-tailored his own monotheistic faith to make it the perfect opponent of Biblical faith. He was not only going to reject the Bible, but was going to fight its followers—Christians and Jews—whom he called enemies of his Allah. And today, the Islamic counter-revolution against the Bible is growing strong all over the world.
Muhammad built Islam on a foundation of lies: that the Bible was corrupted, that Allah (not the God of the Bible) is the true God, that Jesus is only a prophet and not the Son of God, that Christians are polytheists because they believe in the Trinity. The credibility of Islam depends on discrediting the Bible.
To see why Muhammad had to make a new religion that would lie about, contradict, and fight the Bible on every point, we need to go back to the starting point for Islam: Mecca, a small city on the Arabian Peninsula, six centuries after Jesus.
Starting from Mecca
Different cultures in the Middle East, the birthplace of the Bible, reacted differently to the Biblical revolution. Following the Bible was going to require major individual, social, and cultural change and adaptation. Some cultures struggled with the Bible and some adopted and converted to Christianity quickly. One example of a culture that took the latter path was Egypt, which became a Christian nation and remained one for six hundred years.
But one culture in particular, that of the Arabian Peninsula, resisted the Bible for several centuries at a time when most of the Middle East was part of the Christian Byzantine Empire.
Finally, in the seventh century AD, there came a point when pagan Arabs started feeling the strong influence of the people of the book, many of whom lived in Arabia. The Arabs were at a crossroads. They felt the pull of monotheism, which they had learned about from Christians and Jews and the Bible they believed in. The Arabs came very close to embracing the Gospel.
But in the end the proud, cutthroat, and rebellious desert culture of Arabia mustered the most ferocious rebellion against the Bible that the world has ever seen. Muhammad started a vicious counter-revolution against the Bible, and his followers have never let go of it to this day.
Mecca was a religious and commercial center in Arabia, important mostly because of the Kaaba, a pre-Islamic religious monument. As we have already seen, before Islam the Kaaba was a pagan shrine. Over three hundred and sixty gods were worshipped there. Muhammad’s father was the head of the Quraish tribe, which had control over the Kaaba. That gave Muhammad’s family a special status among the Arab tribes.
But by Muhammad’s time, Arabia was already softening to monotheism. There were respected and wealthy tribes of Jews locally, and Christians had their little corner among other religions in the Kaaba. Finally, Arabian culture was on the very cusp of being transformed by the Gospel, as virtually every other culture in the Middle East already had been.
Muhammad knew that if the Bible won Arabia over, it would be the end of his tribe’s power. If the Arabs became Christians, pilgrims would no longer flock to the Kaaba from all over Arabia. Instead they would go to the north, to Jerusalem. Accepting the Bible would also mean that the Arabs now shared a religion with the Byzantine Empire, which was the major power in their region. And that did not sit well with fierce Arab pride. Muhammad wanted to fight the Byzantine Christians, not fall within their orbit. And there were also Muhammad’s personal desires. Accepting the Bible would mean accepting Christian morality, which forbids lust, greed, and violent hatred.
Muhammad knew it was only a matter of time before the Arabs would embrace major cultural and religious transformation that was going to touch every aspect of their lives—and strip his own tribe of its source of power in Mecca, threaten the independence of all the proud Arab tribes, and interfere with his own personal ambitions for power and pleasure. Believing in the Bible would have upended the entire culture of Arabia. The Bible would have replaced the unceasing violence of Arabia with peace and the culture of pride and shame with a new culture of freedom and happiness. It also would have turned Muhammad’s own life upside down.
So he had to move quickly to offer an alternative: to unite Arabia under a purely Arabian monotheistic religion that would challenge the authenticity of the Bible. Islam was a strategy to use Arab pride as a defense against the appeal of Christianity, a movement to prevent Arab culture from being transformed by Biblical values. And it was very effective. Arab pride veiled the eyes of Arabia against the gospel.
Muhammad’s plan was not fully formed at first. There were many twists and turns along the way, as Islam slowly took the form we know today. When the Prophet began, he needed to bolster his credibility with approval from the people of the book. So to appeal to Christians and Jews, he linked his new faith to Abraham. He also started praying toward Jerusalem, hoping that that would influence Jews and Christians to convert to his new religion. When they declined, Muhammad flipped. He declared that the Bible was intentionally corrupted by the hypocrite Jews and Christians, and started praying toward Mecca, which was still a pagan city at that time.
No Arab was allowed to convert to Christianity on Muhammad’s watch—on penalty of death. That is still the law in Islam today. The Koran itself commands Muslims not to befriend or deal with Jews and Christians, but to convert them, and if they refuse enslave them or kill them. The doctrine of “loyalty and enmity,” which we have already looked at in detail, is a tactic that was first used by Muhammad and is still used by Muslims today to keep Muslims from getting close enough to Jews and Christians to learn what the Bible really says.
Muhammad’s plan, as we have seen, was to conquer Jerusalem, build a mosque on top of the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, and turn it into Islam’s second holiest city. That plan succeeded after Muhammad’s death. Jerusalem was conquered by Arabs, and to this very day Muslims consider it their second holiest city. The purpose was to take it from Jews and Christians, and never to allow them to be first.
Muhammad was on a sacred mission to save Arabia from loss of power, and the Arabs from any diminution of their pride. So he came up with a holy book—like the one the Christians and Jews had, but with crucial differences. Like the Bible, this new holy book taught monotheism. But the monotheistic religion that it taught was uniquely Arab. The God it preached was a combination of the Meccan moon god “Allah” with some confused Bible stories. The Koran is full of confusion and contradictions—perhaps because of the haste in which Muhammad’s new religion was created, in the few years before its Prophet died.
The end result was a book that constantly has to be defended by Muslims—less by reasoned arguments than with threats of terror. It is no surprise that Jews and Christians could not make sense of the Koran and rejected it—when they were free to do so. They considered it an abomination, and it was.
Even Arabs were not convinced by the Koran; they converted only after Muhammad’s use of terror. In fact Muhammad did not know how to evangelize the pagans of Mecca; instead of reaching out to win their hearts, he insulted and cursed them and called them infidels.
His anger mounted as Arabs continued to refuse to convert to Islam. When curses and threats did not work, Muhammad tried to bribe them with promises of wealth, booty, and power from the conquest and subjugation of others. According to Islamic records on the life of Muhammad, the Prophet’s uncle brought Muhammad and Meccan leaders together to talk about their grievances over Muhammad’s abuse of their gods. At that meeting, both Muhammad and his uncle made the possibility that the Meccans under Muhammad would conquer others and enrich themselves a selling point for Islam. Muhammad’s uncle promised that “if you follow him in his religion, you shall be the kings of the Arabs and the non-Arabs” (Al-Tabari, 142–43). Muhammad himself promised that the Meccans “will rule over the non-Arabs” and said, “Uncle, I want them to utter one saying. If they say it, the Arabs will submit to them and the non-Arabs will pay the jizyah to them.”3
Muhammad’s pitch to the leaders of Mecca says it all. The Prophet enticed them to convert to Islam by promising them power and wealth. He promised them everything: to be “kings” over both Arabs and non-Arabs, who would bow and submit to them, plus riches from the extortion of protection money, jizya, from Jews and Christians.
Muhammad’s offers to the Meccan leadership were rejected over and over again. Peaceful negotiations failed Muhammad. At that point, he resorted to the sword. Suddenly Allah flipped to commanding Muhammad to do violence: “fight and slay the pagans (mushrikiin) wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)” (Koran 9:5). The Meccan leadership that had opposed Muhammad was viciously killed, and their holy Kaaba was converted to Islam by the sword. Muhammad’s dealings with the Meccans is a perfect example of an Islamic tactic we have already looked at closely: “lure and terror.”
Islam became the shield of Arabia against the impact of the Bible and against the transformation that Christianity had been on the verge of bringing to the Arabs. Instead of adopting the Bible, Arabia chose to become enemy number one of Jews, Christians, and the values of the Ten Commandments.
Preserving Arab Pride and Shame
Adopting Christianity would have meant losing Arabian culture, with its brutal tribal customs of pride and shame. Muhammad knew that monotheism was coming to his people sooner rather than later, and he had to move quickly. He had to lead his people away from the Bible and unite them under a new monotheistic religion. By declaring that Christians and Jews had intentionally corrupted the Bible, he created a rift of distrust between the Bedouins of Arabia and the people of the book. And then he was able to sell the Arabs on his own competing monotheistic faith, complete with its own moral values, laws, and concepts of right and wrong.
Muhammad’s pride was not going to let Arabs take orders from foreign leaders in Constantinople or Rome. Distrust of the outside world prevented Muhammad from accepting a foreign holy book, regardless of how desperately his people needed it. Islam was Muhammad’s solution to the problem of how to preserve what he felt were Arabia’s cultural superiority, political independence, and power. He was not going to allow his nation to become just another province of the Byzantine Empire.
To this day, Muslims know that their counter-revolution will lose to the Bible if the jihad ends and people are allowed to choose freely what to believe. To keep the rebellion against the Bible going, the state of war must be permanent. Because Muslims do not trust their religion to survive on its own, the holy land of the Jews and Christians must remain a torn war zone, held hostage as ransom. It has to be re-conquered by the Muslims, so that it will stay subsidiary to Mecca, and there will be no revival of the threat that the Bible once posed to Arab culture in the region.
Islam was founded on the values of pride, greed, envy, and power. Muhammad knew he could not achieve his incredibly devilish plan peacefully, and he was more than okay with his followers living in a constant state of horrific terror and violence. He convinced his followers that anyone who stood in his way was an enemy of Allah and must be eliminated. Fear, public humiliation, slavery, rape, and terror became Islam’s permanent winning formula, the foundation upon which Muhammad’s new religion was established.
Muhammad and the Jews
Muhammad never truly respected Jews and Christians, even though at the beginning of his mission he praised them. In fact his true feelings toward Jews and Christians were colored with deep envy. Muhammad expressed this envy not by becoming Christian or Jewish, but—as we have seen—by plagiarizing what he could from the Bible and linking his new religion to the history of the people of the book to gain legitimacy.
But Jews and Christians disputed Muhammad’s claims, misrepresentations, confusions, and errors in reporting Bible stories. So, as we have seen, Muhammad responded by accusing Jews and Christians of falsifying their Bible. He pretended that the original uncorrupted Bible was like the Koran and agreed with Muhammad.
Even though Muhammad knew that all the Biblical prophets were Jews with no connection to the history of Mecca, he still continued to link himself and the Kaaba to Abraham.
Muhammad’s deep envy and rage when his fellow monotheists, the Jews, rejected his new religion, knew no bounds: “Among the Jews are those who distort words from their [proper] usages and say, we hear and disobey. . . . But Allah has cursed them for their disbelief, so they believe not, except for a few” (Koran 4:46). The Koran is an extremely hateful, angry, anti-Semitic book. In The Legacy of Anti-Semitism in Islam, Andrew Bostom has detailed and documented indisputable evidence of a uniquely Islamic anti-Semitism, a specific Muslim hatred of Jews that has been expressed continuously since the advent of Islam.
The Koran describes Allah as a hater of whole groups of people, particularly the Jews. Non-believers in Islam, especially Jews, are condemned and cursed. To express his devotion to Allah, a Muslim must torture and murder Jews until the Day of Judgment. Many verses of the Koran describe Jews as apes and swine and threaten them with horrible punishments: “Become apes—despised and disgraced!” (7:166); “Be apes—despised and hated by all” (2:65); “They are those whom Allah has cursed; who have been under His wrath; some of whom were turned into apes and swine”(5:60); “Allah has cursed them on account of their unbelief” (2:88); “Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers; The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned” (5:33); “they shall have disgrace in this world, and they shall have a grievous chastisement in the hereafter” (5:41); “Amongst them we (Allah) have placed enmity and hatred till the Day of Judgment” (5:64).
At Muhammad’s deathbed the Jews and Christians were still on his mind. He commanded his followers not to leave either Jews or Christians in Arabia. Muhammad also commanded them to kill the Jews wherever they went, even if they hid from the Muslims. This was Muhammad’s deathbed wish, and so far the unfinished business with the Jews and Christians has lasted for fourteen hundred years. Non-Muslims are banned from ever entering Mecca and Medina, an originally Jewish city. No Christian or Jew today calls Saudi Arabia home, though some live there on temporary permits.
War on non-Muslims wasn’t the only conflict Muhammad’s successors had on their hands after his death. When the Prophet died, Arabian tribes abandoned Islam and went back to their old gods. But Muhammad’s successor, Abu Bakr, wanted to preserve Muslim power, so he launched the brutal and bloody two-year “war of apostasy” to bring Arabia back to Islam. Islamic history is proud of these wars, which are documented in detail—including how tens of thousands of Arabs were burned, beheaded, dismembered, and crucified. It’s not very different from what ISIS is doing today.
After Arabia was solidly under Muslim control, Christians and Jews across the Middle East lost to Islam also. The Byzantine Empire lost to Islam, and under sharia, the jizya tax, and the dhimmi system the remaining Christian and Jewish populations in the entire region that Islam had conquered gradually shrank. Those who managed to survive and kept their faith had to pay protection money in addition to living humiliated in second-class status. They have been living in survival mode ever since, and their ability to grow and thrive within their faith in the Bible has been stunted. Christians and Jews in the Muslim world are prohibited from practicing and expressing their religion publicly and denied the right to build churches, lecture, dialogue, debate, or even share religious books.
Islam is all about depriving non-Muslims of self-government and the right to practice their faith, not about nourishing and reviving the internal life of Muslims. According to Sayyid Qutb, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the ’50s and ’60s: “The foremost duty of Islam is to depose the government and society of unbelievers (jahiliyyah) from the leadership of man.”4
Expansion
Muhammad was animated by an obsessive need to capture, seize, and expand. This is an attribute of the predatory desert tribal culture of Arabia. Even today, the motto of ISIS is “baqiya wa tatamaddad,” which means “remaining and expanding”—the jihad principle of constantly staying in, fighting to keep what you have, and being in a constant outward motion against cultures that do not want to convert to Islam.
Muhammad was probably the ultimate ethnocentric. He rejected the Biblical transformation and renewal for his people rather than surrender his power and pride. Islam was his shield and sword against the Bible.
Muhammad’s ambitions were limitless. He was not just going to be the final prophet, but also a warrior and the political leader of a constantly expanding Muslim state, “the Ummah.” For that purpose no grisly deed was off limits, and anyone and everyone could be sacrificed for Allah and Muhammad’s sake. As Muhammad himself said, “I have been sent with the shortest expressions bearing the widest meanings, and I have been made victorious with terror, and while I was sleeping, the keys of the treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand” (Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220).
Muhammad claimed superiority over all the Abrahamic prophets, including Jesus, whom he insisted was just a prophet. The hadith report that Muhammad said, “I have been given superiority over the other prophets in six respects: I have been given words which are concise but comprehensive in meaning; I have been helped by terror (in the hearts of enemies): spoils have been made lawful to me: the earth has been made for me clean and a place of worship; I have been sent to all mankind and the line of prophets is closed with me” (Sahih Muslim, Book 004, Number 1062, 1063, 1066, 1067).
To make sure Arabian culture would be closed to any change, the Koran commands Muslims not to befriend non-Muslims or to make peace, except when Muslims are weak. That may explain why Islam’s borders with non-Muslim nations have always been to be bloody.
Islam is not about transforming hearts and renewing minds; it is about conquering lands and enslaving minds. That was all that was on Muhammad’s mind, even when he was on his deathbed, when he said, “No two religions are allowed in Arabia” and ordered the forced conversion, expulsion, or ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians and the murder of pagans.
After his death, Muhammad’s successors continued the very profitable business of conquering non-Muslims and seizing their wealth. They conquered the Middle East with incredible speed. Expansion became a way of life, a business, and the holy right and duty of every Muslim individual, leader, army, and government.
To this day, the world still suffers from Islamic jihad. And as we have already seen, not one Islamic leader has taken responsibility for the centuries-old culture that created 9/11, Al Qaeda, and ISIS. Instead, Muslim media, politicians, and the Muslim education system continue to blame the West, Israel, historical injustices against Muslims, colonialism, American foreign policy, and Israeli overreaction to Arab shelling and terror. When there are no other excuses, they resort to name calling, and the slurs of “racist” and “Islamophobia” work to silence any critics in the West.
Confusion is the name of the game. “Moderate” Muslims and Muslim governments blame the so-called “radicals.” The Muslim Brotherhood claims to be moderate and blames Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda blames ISIS. And ISIS blames U.S. foreign policy and the inhumanity of Israeli soldiers.
The sad thing is that many in the West are taken in by this charade. Only a miracle from God will rescue the West from its delusions about Islam.
The Original Culture Clash
The fact is, the original culture clash between Muslims and Bible believers had nothing to do with Europe or America. It originated and erupted inside the Middle East, with a rebellion in the Arabian Peninsula against what Islam called “the people of the book”—Jews and Christians.
The Jews and Christians of the Middle East lost this first culture clash, were forced to submit to Islam, and had sharia law and second-class dhimmi status imposed on them. Then, as we have already seen, centuries of this Muslim abuse destroyed Christian communities across the Islamic Muslim world. Once Bible believers were pushed back to Europe, Muslims attacked them there. The Christians in Europe managed to fend off the jihad, and in modern times the technological achievements of the West kept Islam at bay. But in the last few decades the ferocious Islamic jihad against the Bible has been reignited with a vengeance all over the world, but especially in Europe, America, and Australia.
Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt (1858–1919) predicted that if we do not fight we will lose to Islam the same way the people of the book in the Middle East lost to Islam in the seventh century: “Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equal with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated. . . .”5
Perpetrators Posing as Victims
Islam must conquer and expand, but today, when—thanks to the influence of Biblical values—most people believe in peace and human rights, Muslims must cover up their violence and create confusion about their intentions.
Most human beings do not want to live in a permanent state of hatred, hostility, and literal war with others. The classic Islamic tactics of “lure and terror” and “loyalty and enmity” have been very effective at keeping Muslims on board with jihad at the expense of their safety and security, their family lives, and their happiness. But there is also another tactic in the Islamic arsenal. Nothing works—like magic—on the human psyche better than the picture of yourself as a victim. Keeping Muslims in a constant state of paranoia is Islam’s most powerful motivational tool for jihad.
My friend the cartoonist Bosch Fawstin, a former Muslim originally from Albania, explains the victimhood myth that Muslims have bought into in an article entitled: “The Muslim World Is a World Where the Bad Guy Won.” As Fawstin explains, Muslims need to understand that their own religion is at war with them (as well as with the rest of the world).
In reality, Muslims are victims of Islam. And yet they have been convinced that somehow they are the victims of the people Islam wants to conquer.
After all, the best defense is a good offense. It’s much easier for the defenders of Islam to accuse the rest of the world of victimizing Muslims—however little basis that claim has in the facts—than to explain away the actual violence that jihadists are perpetrating on the non-Muslim world.
The Muslims-as-victims-of-the-West myth defies the reality of history, not to mention the present-day Islamic genocide on Middle East Christians, Jews, and other minorities such as Yazidis. It also contradicts the facts about the victimization of some Muslims—the Kurds, for example—by other Muslims, whether for ethnic reasons or because of hostility between different sects of Islam.
Even actual acts of Islamic terror are used as evidence of the Muslim victim myth. After every act of terrorism by a Muslim, Muslims explain it away as a reaction to being victimized and insulted by the West. Islamic logic is You made me do it.6
Unfortunately, the non-Muslim world has bought into this myth as well. Western politicians and media keep repeating such obviously false Islamic claims. During a 2016 Democratic primary debate, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of angering ISIS: “They are going out to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.” In fact there were no ISIS recruitment videos featuring Trump at that time.
Three speakers at the fourteenth annual Muslim American Society-Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) convention on December 2, 2015, allied themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming to be oppressed and calling for a revolutionary movement inside America similar to the Arab Spring. Khalilah Sabra said: “We are the community that staged a revolution across the world. If we can do that, why can’t we have that revolution in America?”7 This is the modus operandi of Islam wherever it goes. It claims, Muslims are your victims, thus we must rebel and destroy you and then take over.
Muslim historians claim that the Arab conquest of Christian Egypt liberated the Coptic Christians from the oppression of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire. But such historians fail to tell us that the Arab invasion of Egypt ended Christianity in that nation, changing the laws of Egypt to sharia, its language to Arabic, and its religion to Islam by the sword of terror. Now Muslims in Egypt claim to be the victims of Coptic Christians who want to rebel against Islam.
Positioning Muslims as victims not only justifies their violent attacks on non-Muslims. It also redirects Muslims’ anger about their miserable lives under sharia law. They do live lives under oppression—from Islamic law. But the misery and horror of life under sharia must be blamed on the outside world if Islam is to survive. So the West must always be seen as exploiting Muslims, plotting against them, stripping them of their honor and pride.
As a child, I remember often seeing Israeli leaders portrayed in Arabic cartoons as monsters with the blood of Arab children dripping from their mouths. Western leaders were shown as puppeteers manipulating the poor Arabs and their puppet leaders.
Islamic schools today teach Arab children that the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died by poisoning at the hands of Jews, so they call him “shahid,” or martyr. The reality of Arafat’s chronic health issues does not stop the Islamic propaganda.
This strategy of spreading paranoia and the victimhood mentality has worked miracles for Islam for fourteen hundred years. This same accusation was leveled at the time of Muhammad’s death—supposedly the Prophet was poisoned by Jews. The tactics are the same, they just keep repeating, but the West never seems to learn from history.
Even acts of compassion and kindness by Jews and Christians, such as the distribution of free medicines to poor nations, or food aid in times of catastrophe, are often twisted around and portrayed as acts of intentional evil. When Israel went to help Haitian earthquake victims, it was reported on Arab television that the Israelis had really gone to Haiti not to help but to harvest the organs of the Haitian people. The Arab audience, who are constantly told lies and are also commanded by their religion to lie, believe and repeat such lies as true. Islamic culture has killed Muslims’ human instinct to question slander. And the upshot is that Muslims are prevented from developing feelings of compassion or empathy toward the enemies of Allah.
The Biblical Revolution in Ethics vs. the Islamic Counter-Revolution
The Bible has given us an ethics revolution to live by, but with Islam humanity got a major setback. Today there is a global fight between the ethics of Islam and the ethics of the Bible. Western politicians tell us Islam is a religion of peace that does not represent an existential threat. That is a lie.
The flame of the Islamic rebellion against the Bible has been burning for fourteen hundred years. It is fueled by terrorism, but also by intentional misinformation, propaganda, and lies.
When I became Christian and heard for the first time that we human beings were made in the image of God, I wept. I was in awe at the honor, after being given shame and little value under Islam. The God of the Bible tells me that I am His child and that I am forgiven and saved. I am safe and blessed by Biblical ethics because the God I know from the Bible will never give us commandments that are hurtful to others or to ourselves. It was so freeing to adapt to the blessings of the Bible after suffering under the commandments of Islamic sharia. Those commandments have destroyed not only countless individual human psyches, but whole nations.
Biblical ethics were designed by the true, loving God to give us the best life possible, a happiness that is even beyond our imagination. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are ours to keep, but only if we keep on holding tight to our Bible.